A Fragment of Hotel Hack

August 12, 2002

The purpose of fiction is to tell a story. Hopefully one with few
distractions. While most people overlook (or don't even notice) bad
typography or layout, there comes a point where even the best of stories may
be harmed by looking bad.

I hope Mad Gregor doesn't mind us dialing into his network, but
really, it makes sense—after all, he's wired his network to
repel incoming
connections, but there's nothing preventing us from going out
from it. It was a simple matter of keeping him occupied (Look
Gregor! Benadryl! Want some?) and having Yigal install the modem on one of his
unused computers. I also know Mad Gregor; he's a sucker for hoomei and Kurosawafilms. A few
well placed calls to Kyzyl, some social
engineering, and Mad Gregor has a stack of hoomei records and a copies of Dersu Uzala and
Ran.

We're not ten minutes into the operation when the hotel phone rings.
My first thought is that hotel management is on to us, noticing our
arrival in a '73hot
pinkMonte
Carlo with a trunk full of empty Benadryl bottles and a random
assortment of various computer equipment held together with duct tape.
Waldorf
Astoria. Room service. Keep them guessing I always say.

He's on to us! I yell to Yigal, knowing we only have moments
before the Boys from Bell show up. Yigal runs out the room to ready
the car as I start pulling cords in an attempt to salvage what
equipment we can in the minutes remaining.

There's a reason why you seldom see underlined or bold text in fiction (or
in publications in general): it doesn't look that good. It's
distracting,
typographically speaking. And for fiction, you don't want the
reader distracted. You want the reader absorbed in the narrative, unable to
put down the book.

But this presents a problem for hypertext based fiction. On the one hand,
without links, there is no hypertext; that's the point of hypertext
to begin with. But the current method of designating links in HTML is distracting,
typographically speaking, and that may be the point of changing the color
and underlining the text—to draw attention to the existence of the
link.

So, this experiment (and if you can read this, then the
intent of the experiment is lost. The links are being presented differently
through the use of CSS and
your browser does not support them. Keep that in mind when reading the rest
of this). Initially, there should be no links visible in
“Fragment.” Why even bother with links if you can't see them?
To render the distractions to a minimum when reading fiction. And if you
are curious enough to wonder who Ethel Merman is, you can always click on
her name and find out.

Ideally, each word should be linked, if just to a definition of the word
(which to me as a gradeschool kid, would have been a Godsend; imagine! No
more having to drag out the dictionary). But having such a densely linked
passage would be rather difficult to read, being (as is the current standard
in HTML to have links
underlined) which explains why I am initially hiding the links in
“Fragment” (even though not every word is linked).

That might prove to be too subtle so I am providing some alternative
versions in addition to the invisible links
version, I have one where the links are designated by small dots on either side, and one where I
use single angle quotes to mark links.
And then there's always the HTMLstandby.

The text itself was written in June of 1999 in response to semi-fictional
posts to an email list I'm on. It was a case of nearly everyone
contributing to the shared fictional backstory and I figured I'd give it a
try. The sheer number of obscure references was intentional as I was
attempting a My
Cousin, My Gastroenterologist feel to it. The six paragraphs alone took
about two or three hours to write and I seriously doubt I could continue
much further and still maintain the number of references.

It's not easy coming up with enough obscure references (or references in
general) to keep a narrative going.

But I had fun writing it.

It took me about two more hours scrounging up links to turn it into a
hypertext document, and a further two days writing the commentary
on it; this is the third major edit I've made to date.

I don't know what's worse, writing about Mag Gregor when the Benadryl kicks
in, or writing about the writing about Mad Gregor when the Benadryl kicks
in.